On NBN connections and high-tech uses for broomsticks...

I GOT INTO A HABIT OF LISTENING OUT FOR TRUCKS, THEN RUNNING OUT INTO THE STREET WITH A BROOMSTICK...

I thought I’d write in about my experience with the NBN. I live in the Blue Mountains and have had the NBN for about a year now. The service itself is a great help for me, as I often work from home and need to download big files — which now doesn’t take an eternity. However, I wish I had something nice to say about the people and the process surrounding the NBN.

Firstly, I live on a slope, meaning the overhead cable dips down across the street towards my house. As my street is a sleepy cul-de-sac, this wouldn’t normally be a problem (with only cars passing below), but now that there’s a house being built next-door, many large trucks regularly pass by my house. Yes, you can see where this is heading. On several occasions, the trucks have brushed this cable. I got into a habit of listening out for trucks, then running out into the street with a broomstick, halting the trucks, then lifting the cable up so that they could safely pass below it. However, once, a particularly large truck snagged the cable and yanked it clean out from my house — an event that not only halted my workday but caused a lot of disruption to my colleagues.

We rang up the necessary helpline service and were quoted a ridiculous 5–7-day wait time for someone to even come to our house to look at the problem! That was not an acceptable time, obviously, as my wife also works from home and also relies on the internet (not to mention the potential ire we’d experience from our internet-less kids for a week). However, I could not get anything better from calling up our provider — so instead... I took to social media.

I’m not a big social media user, but I have found that it’s very useful with regards to escalating an issue. And it worked a treat. After angrily taking to Twitter, we ended up getting a repairman come the very next day!

I wish that was the end of the story. The repairman who turned up quickly popped the cable back in and hurried off to another job. However, this didn’t solve the initial problem of the cable hanging too low over the street, and my broom-lifting skills were brought into action once again when large trucks passed our house. Deciding I didn’t want to spend my days listening out for trucks, we got our provider to send another repairman to move the cable further up the pole across the street. However, this second cable guy didn’t fully understand our issue and appeared happy to simply do nothing to the cable’s placement, muttering that he knew what he was doing and had been doing his job for 30 years. Not willing to potentially go through the whole truck-broom-cable saga again, however, we insisted he move the cable. Thankfully, he did, and so far... I’ve not needed to run out into the street in my undies with a broom. Well, not for trucks anyway...!